The Bloodstained God (Book 2)

by Tim Stead

  Hestia, however, was pleased. She assented to the plan almost at once, and Skal went about his business picking the men who were to make up the ambush party. He chose veterans, men with discipline and patience. Such qualities would serve them well.

  There were two more attacks in the night, and another man was killed, but no further pursuit was launched, and the men were instructed to sleep beneath their shields, if they could sleep at all.

  Skal had his men up before dawn, and he led them personally, checking them and speaking to them constantly, just as Cain would have done. He had seen the response Cain got from his men this way, and he had learned. At first light they were formed up and ready to march, and even as the Telans set about breaking their camp he walked out of it at the head of his men. He had chosen to take infantry, and to walk himself for the simple reason that it was easier to set an ambush if you didn’t have horses to conceal which might give you away with an imprudent noise.

  Within an hour they had reached Greenhow. There were no Seth Yarra there, as he had predicted, but the town was far from empty. Skal ordered the Telan royal standard unfurled as they entered the town, and it seemed to work. Men and women came out onto the streets to watch them pass, and some even called out to them. Skal’s men were clearly not Telan themselves, and Skal made a point of not requesting any assistance from the people of Greenhow, but instead took time to warn them that their queen approached, and would need what little they could spare to carry on the fight against the invader.

  They seemed receptive to his message, and even glad that Avilians were riding in alliance with their queen.

  So they left Greenhow behind them, warmed for the queen’s arrival, but otherwise untouched. Skal now studied the lie of the land with a tactical eye. Somewhere in the next few miles he must find a site for an ambush, a place where he could hide five hundred men on both sides of the road.

  He found what he was looking for quite quickly.

  The road north followed the river, and every now and again it swung away into the low hills where a bluff or a sharp bend made the detour desirable. It was mixed country, and though it had not been immune to the depredations of the nearby town there were still substantial areas of woodland. At one point the road curved back to the river over a rocky bluff, dropping down to the water and tracking the west bank faithfully for half a mile with dense woodland narrowing the path.

  It was ideal. The river would act as his eastern force and he would conceal his men in the woods. He gave his orders and left the sign he had agreed with Hestia on the road – four stones in a line and a fifth beside them. This would let her know where the ambush lay, so that she was certain to make camp beyond.

  He knew that it would be hours, even perhaps after dark, before the Seth Yarra passed by, so he put his men to conceal themselves and rest as best they could. He left a couple of dozen men on guard and waited for Hestia.

  By midday there was still no sign of the queen, though they were barely two hours march from their overnight campsite, and he guessed that they had been delayed in Greenhow. The day passed slowly, and Skal was unable to take his own advice and rest. He grew increasingly impatient.

  He imagined that Hestia had once more fallen prey to bad advice and had made camp in the town, looking to the comfort of her men ahead of the plan they had agreed. He did not trust her to do what was wise if he was not there to prompt her.

  He was also troubled with the thought that she might be challenged again. This was foolish, because the time for challenge was past according to Telan law, and those that followed her were now bound by their honour to serve her. But Skal found that he doubted Telan honour almost as much as he doubted Telan prudence.

  He was relieved when his scouts eventually reported the approach of a body of men that could only be Hestia’s army, and so it proved to be. Skal did not break cover, but he watched from the woods as Hestia approached, stopped her horse at the sign he had left, and dismounted to scatter the stones. It was clear evidence that she had seen it. He saw her look into the woods, but his men were well hidden by now, and he guessed that she saw nothing but shadows.

  The army marched and rode by, and as the last of them passed out of sight Skal could feel the tension in the woods around him rising.

  The next thing to come down the road would be Seth Yarra.

  The rest of the afternoon crept by them, minute by minute. Every man was silent, straining to hear the slightest noise above the muttering roar of the river. It was still as an autumn dawn. The wind did not blow and the forest was quiet around them as though it was holding its breath in sympathy with their vigil.

  It was dusk when the scouts gave their signal: a scattering of stones that fell among the men like the first hint of rain. A minute later Skal saw a man, just one, walking along the road. He walked slowly and looked about him. A scout. He was followed by five more, coming over the bluff and down onto the road in front of the forest. Skal waited. These were not the men he wanted to kill.

  The first man paused, signalled back to the five and then went on. The stretch of road below the forest was close to half a mile in length, and he watched the five move onto it. They were cautious, but not overly so.

  He caught sight of the main body. As they came down the road, marching in good order, he saw that their number was about what he had guessed – more than two hundred, and less than three. A lot of them carried bows.

  Skal continued to wait. If his men had been Telans the battle would already have started, but the rabbit was hardly in the trap, and he wanted to spring it to total effect, not have a few dozen men run away back towards Greenhow.

  Skal had put six score men at the north end of the wood and six score at the south. His remaining force formed a line fifty paces back into the trees. It was a thin sided box, but he had recruited the trees to shore it up, and his men were ready.

  The moment came. Skal gave the signal, which was the simplest he could imagine. He yelled as loud as he could.

  The box closed. Skal walked forwards through the trees with the line, their pace kept it straight, almost shoulder to shoulder, passing around the trees. Already there was a steady clash of steel from the north and south, and he heard arrows from his own men flicking away into the mass of Seth Yarra soldiers. The timing had been good. All they had to do was hold and it would be over in minutes.

  The line joined the battle, sealing the trap. The few Seth Yarra who had run into the forest to escape were quickly dealt with. None of them were anywhere near Skal. He stepped out onto the road and was attacked at once, but the man had no skill and was quickly despatched.

  The cornered men were not cleansers, at least they were not dressed in black, but they fought well enough. Skal engaged another man and found himself quite tested. They exchanged blows for a minute or two before Skal could find a weakness and worked his blade through to take the man in the throat.

  There was a cry from his left, and he saw that a dozen or so had broken his line, and were escaping into the woods. His own portion was quiet – most of the Seth Yarra that faced him and the men around him having been killed or pushed towards the ends of the trap. He quickly picked ten men to follow him and set off in pursuit.

  It was growing dark now, and their quarry was no more than moving shadows and noise ahead of them. Arrows flew from behind, his own men shooting past him, and he saw a couple of the Seth Yarra fall.

  He was catching them. As they went deeper into the wood the undergrowth thickened and progress became difficult. They were all stumbling in the gloom, but the Seth Yarra were in thicker stuff than Skal.

  He jumped a fallen tree, nearly fell headlong, and found himself attacked. Three of them had turned while the others pushed on into the twilit forest. He parried two blows and shuffled back, half his mind on his feet. They were as hampered as he, but Skal had never decided whether a handicap shared would favour the more skilled or the less. Now he thought it might favour them.

  He got through one man’s gua
rd and nicked his shoulder…

  The world exploded. Skal was suddenly blind and deaf, immersed in a river of light and noise. He couldn’t feel the sword in his hand, couldn’t see the Seth Yarra, couldn’t even tell up from down. It terrified him. Not only did he not understand what was happening, could not begin to guess, but he was fiercely aware that he was facing two or three armed men.

  He tried to jump back, but he had no sensation of his own legs and muscles. It was as though he was a disembodied mind, subject to the whims of the torrent that surrounded him, severed from the rest of his body.

  The world came back. It rushed in like a bolt of lightning, a flash and he was lying on his back beneath the darkening forest canopy. He barely had time to be thankful before he saw a Seth Yarra spear point descending on him.

  There just wasn’t enough time. It seemed that a moment before he had been standing before these Seth Yarra, confident that he was going to kill them, and now he was flat on his back, defenceless. He tried to twist, but it was far too late. He felt the impact of the spear against his breastplate. The man had put everything behind the blow, and the sheet metal burst, the point split his skin, pushed between his ribs and plunged through. He felt it break through his back and bury itself in the ground beyond.

  Two thoughts occurred to him at the same time.

  How unfair, and what a waste.

  65. Jerac Fane

  Alos Stebbar, master carpenter, patron of the inn now called The Seventh Friend which had once been The Wolf Triumphant, a man whose trade these days was so much in coffins that people called him Deadbox, awoke.

  He was alone in his house, and could not say what had awoken him, though he felt uncomfortably warm. The faint sounds of the night time city came to him, a voice singing, a distant shout, a ringing bell, the creak of a wagon passing in the street, but there was no noise from the house. His workshop below was tidy and locked. The apprentices’ rooms were empty, both of his young men having volunteered for war. His wife was long dead. He had no children.

  So what had awakened him?

  Nothing, perhaps. He was not a young man and often awoke in the night.

  But tonight felt different. When he was a child he had awoken to a new day feeling bright and full of energy, and now he felt the same. Sleep did not call to him at all. He eased himself up and rested his back against the wall. His back felt rested, too, and there was no pain. If only he felt like this when he had to work!

  He pulled the blankets aside and swung his legs out of the bed, reaching for the lamp that stood ready by the side. He left the lamp lit at night, but turned low and hooded so that it did not wake him. Now he took off the hood and turned it up, flooding his room with yellow light. He flexed his fingers to get the stiffness out of them, and found that there was none. His joints felt positively oiled today.

  He stopped and stared at his hand. He knew his hand, proverbially so. He knew the wrinkled papery skin, the three liver spots, two on the left, one on the right. This was not his hand. He looked at his other hand and found that it, too, was an impostor. He pulled up the sleeves of his night gown and found that his arms were smooth and muscular. He flexed his hand again and watched the sinews move, the muscles bunch. This was a young man’s arm.

  He stood. He straightened. There was no pain at all. He twisted left to right, right to left, a guarantee of pain in his lower back, but the stabbing sensation never came. With mounting excitement he took a breath, a deep breath, and felt his lungs fill and his chest expand. Gods he felt good.

  It must be a dream, he thought. I am dreaming that I am young again.

  He pinched his arm, pinched it hard enough to make him wince. Nothing happened. He slapped his face, felt the skin sting and redden, but he did not wake.

  On the other side of the room there was a bowl of cold water prepared for the morning, and he walked over to it, dipped his hands in and wet his face. He rubbed vigorously. He caught sight of himself in the mirror.

  It must be a dream.

  He went and fetched the lamp from beside his bed, the better to see. He put it beside the mirror.

  The man that looked back at him from the glass was familiar, but he had not seen that face in a long time. He stared. It was Alos Stebbar, aged about twenty-five, maybe less. He touched his face, and the young man in the mirror touched his face. He stuck out his tongue, and the young man copied him.

  It’s me. I’m young again.

  He dismissed all thought of returning to bed. He dressed. He had to find out of this was real. It was not that late. He took early to his bed these days. Usually he finished up whatever he was doing in the shop, locked the door and went for a glass of ale at the Friend. Sometimes he had two. Then it was home and bed. It had been his routine for many years, but since his apprentices had gone to war it was a lonely one. He had friends who he met in the Friend, or acquaintances. They were men who knew his name, at any rate.

  As he locked the door to his house behind him and walked the few streets between it and the Friend he tried to find an explanation for what had happened. He had been in his sixties, a man worn down by a life of hard work, bereft of adventure, starved of exception. It had been a very ordinary life. He had married late, seen his wife die failing to give birth to their first child, and he had never married again. He had dreamed of being a soldier, but lacked the courage to enlist. He was a good carpenter, but no more than that. He thought of himself as a good man, but never seemed to be surrounded by friends. He supposed that he was boring.

  There had been just one remarkable event in his life.

  It had been more than a year ago, in the spring. He had been drinking with his apprentices in the Wolf Triumphant as it then was, and Wolf Narak had walked in. He hadn’t known at first. The resemblance was there. He’d seen the wolf’s image in his temple in the high city, but it was so impossible a thing that he had merely thought it a likeness.

  There was another man who frequented the same inn, a man called Tegal who was the worst sort of bully, a man who stole and cheated and threatened. He had threatened Narak and been soundly beaten. It was the manner of that beating that had convinced Deadbox that he was, indeed, Wolf Narak. And Deadbox had been the only one who’d guessed. He’d sat at the god’s table for a good two hours and shared ale with him, and at the end he’d revealed that he knew, and the Wolf was pleased, and had said the five magical words: you are in my favour.

  Since that day his health had remained much the same. His back still hurt, but no more than it had before, and he had not been sick a single day.

  Now this. The only explanation was the Wolf, but he had never heard of such a thing. It was impossible.

  He arrived at the inn and walked in. Since the war there had been no need of a man on the door. There were not enough people to pack the bar as in the old days when Cain Arbak had taken over. Now it was busy, but there was always a seat to be had by the bar. He sat and ordered his usual ale, looking around for a familiar face.

  He saw Gordis, sitting at a table with other men he knew. Gordis was not exactly a friend, but he was a fellow carpenter who had offered several times to buy the workshop and house, but Deadbox had always refused him. The place was his only source if income, his pension and his legacy.

  He picked up his ale and walked casually towards Gordis and his friends. As he drew closer, however, his steps slowed and faltered. He could not tell Gordis the truth. He could not tell anyone the truth. They would assume that he was lying, and there was nothing Deadbox could do to disprove the assumption. He could lose everything, and there would certainly be trouble, one way or the other.

  Inspiration struck, and overwhelmed by an uncharacteristic spirit of bravado he continued to walk towards Gordis, quickening his step. He adopted the posture of his youth, which had a little more swagger that his old man’s body could have coped with.

  “Are you Gordis?” he asked.

  Gordis looked at him appraisingly. “Who asks?” he said.

  “Jerac F
ane,” he said. He chose his dead son’s name, the child they’d never had, and his cousin’s husband’s last name.

  “And who is Jerac Fane?” Gordis asked.

  “You know my great uncle, Alos Stebbar,” he said.

  “You’re Deadbox’s kin?”

  “Aye, I heard you call him that.” He put displeasure into his voice, but it didn’t seem to bother Gordis.

  “Well, sit and join us, Jerac,” Gordis said.

  “I’ll not, if it’s all the same. But I have a question: do you still want to buy Uncle Alos’s place?”

  Gordis’s eyes sharpened and he leaned forwards. “He’s selling?”

  “Aye, he is. He’s gone to his cousin in Hornwood because she’s unwell. Dying perhaps, and he’s asked me to sell up and follow him.”